Geordi and Riker Talk to the Pakeds, or Bill Nye Talks to Folks in Kentucky

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I wasn't going to spend nearly the entire program reviewing the Ham/Nye debate, but that's what I ended up doing. In the process we figured out the best analogy for Nye's attitude toward Kentuckians: that of Riker to the Pakleds on Star Trek the Next Generation! We even played a clip for those who are not familiar with that, uh, story line. Anyway, an entire hour of discussion of worldviews and the like on today's DL.

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00:35
Someday I can just bring in a real guitar and make it look like I'm actually doing this. Because I used to play guitar many, many, many, many years ago, but I had to give it up.
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But I know that I've had dinner with the guy who's doing that. That's the cool part. Welcome to The Dividing Line.
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There's Gray Level with our opening theme, and here we are. A couple of quick things.
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I blogged this morning about our new ministry resource list.
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If you didn't see that, take a look at the blog. I think it's a pretty neat way of doing it. It keeps three -lettered governmental agencies happy, and if you want to keep all three -lettered, the four -lettered governmental agencies, definitely worry about that.
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But the three -letter ones, like NSAIRSFBI, those are the ones you've got to be careful of.
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Have you noticed that? It's the three -letter ones that are scary. You've got to be careful about those guys.
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But anyways, a number of you are already there helping me to pick up stuff. Some possible new opportunities have kicked up real close.
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In other words, while I'm in London, we may do another unbelievable program, and if we do, I'm going to have to spend the next few days
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I've got before I leave really, really busy, riding many, many miles, really, basically, is the only way
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I can get through all this stuff. So we put some stuff up there, and there's even some more stuff there.
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I explain on the blog, I've run into this really weird—the book that I'm writing right now, you have to have a certain number of—you can't go above a certain number of words in each chapter because it's a two -person book.
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It's sort of like back when I wrote with Dave Hunt, we had a certain word limit. The problem is,
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I use a word processor called Millel, which is an Israeli word processor, actually, and it's really good with biblical languages and stuff like that.
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It says my current chapter is 3 ,990 words, 4 ,000 limit, pretty good.
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Put it in Word, 3 ,803. Put it in Pages, 3 ,864. Unfortunately, Word is going to be the one that judges all this, and my
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Word copy is very, very old and likes to crash. Crashed 45 times while editing the
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Quran book. It's just so much fun. It's just these screams of pain from my office.
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So we threw a new edition of Word up there to keep track of these things. But anyways, that's the mystery story list. Take a look at it and help us out if you can.
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Really appreciate the people who do that. Secondly, do pray for the upcoming trip.
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I'm going to be gone the last half of this month, basically. I get home the last day of February, Lord willing.
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That's assuming all the flights go well and everything else. Some wonderful opportunities. Looking forward to meeting all you folks down in Fredericksburg.
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I would like—it'd be really nice if Fredericksburg wasn't completely snowed in or something.
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I am a little concerned about flying through those airports this time of year. 3 ,000 flights canceled yesterday.
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That kind of stuff is going to really throw a crimp in the style, shall we say.
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And then I see a tweet a little while ago from NBC that flying into Russia, you can't take anything on the plane anymore, basically.
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No gels, no nothing. No zip zero nada. No liquids, no gels, nothing. And I'm like,
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I know. That's what I'm hoping is that it's Russia, not
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Ukraine. And it's from the U .S., and I'm not going to be flying there from the U .S. So who knows?
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I don't know. All I know is it looks like it's going to be a pain. But I'm really looking forward to getting to Ukraine and the teaching that we're going to be doing there, and then coming back, stopping in London, getting together with Justin Brierley and that kind of stuff.
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And we appreciate those who have helped us to pay for that element of things, that little extra part of the leg where we go to London.
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So that's very important. Thank you very much for helping along those lines. Obviously, the big news yesterday was the result of the aftermath of the
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Bill Nye -Kenham debate. Now, I have addressed in the past elements of this particular controversy.
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It is not something that we are specifically known for. I've addressed it because I do have at least a basic science background.
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I've said many times one of the mistakes I made as a young person was one day the phone rang.
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It was the registrar at Grand Canyon College at the time saying, you're about to graduate.
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Do you want your B .A. in Bible, your B .S. in biology? And I wasn't given any time.
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I was going to seminary, so I figured, well, I guess the B .A. in Bible would be best. Going to seminary, that was wrong, by the way.
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Would not have mattered to the seminary whatsoever. It would have been much better to have taken the B .S. in biology.
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I finished all the work for it. I was department fellow in anatomy and physiology. I passed all my senior boards. All the rest of that kind of fun stuff.
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And I've mentioned many times I raised 25 -35 ,000 Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies my last semester at Grand Canyon studying the white gene in the chromosomes of the genetic makeup of the
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Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly. I can still smell fly nap, for those of you who have ever done that kind of thing.
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And I found out, of course, after I graduated years later that fly nap was carcinogenic.
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But anyway, hopefully been protected from all of that. But I do have a bit of science background.
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And I've told the story before that after I graduated from Grand Canyon—and by the way,
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I was the only creationist in the biology department at Grand Canyon, even though it was a Christian college. Everyone else were theistic evolutionists or just plain old evolutionists,
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I guess. And I had fought this battle in public high school many, many, many years ago.
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So I wasn't familiar with the issues and obviously dialogued with many of my professors on the relevant issues.
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And shortly after I graduated, I picked up and purchased and read very carefully
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Richard Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker. I wanted to read the best the other side had to say, and I think that probably still is, the best presentation of neo -Darwinian micromutational evolutionary theory.
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There are all sorts of evolutionary theories and various permutations there too.
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And so I read the book, and I did not do so in the company of other people, other
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Christians. It wasn't like we were getting grouped together. It was just me, recent graduate from college, recent department fellow in anatomy and physiology, etc.,
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etc., with a good GPA, by the way. And as I read the book, I came to the conclusion that the key problem with the entire theory was its single -step mode, and that it could not explain systems where you would have to have multiple components before any type of advantage to the offspring of a particular organism would be granted.
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In other words, it would be a negative effect to have to build these structures that would come from alleged micromutations.
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You'd have to have a number of structures to work together before any positive benefit would accrue to the organism, which goes against the micromutational natural selection concept.
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And so I came to that conclusion on my own. I didn't read any quote -unquote creationist books or stuff like that that dealt with any of that stuff.
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I came to that conclusion on my own. I don't know how many years later it was. I happened to be speaking at a church,
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I believe, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And at lunch at a nice Mexican place—they have lots of those in New Mexico—I was talking about this with the brethren there, and I mentioned the conclusions
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I had come to. And they said, oh, you're talking about intelligent design, and you're talking about irreducible complexity. And I'm going, huh?
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What? And since I graduated, these books started coming out, like Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box and stuff like that, that had coined this type of phraseology that I was not familiar with, but had come to the same conclusion on my own.
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And so I picked up those books and read those books. Ah, somebody else thought the exact same thing that I did, and much more than I did, obviously.
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And so I've always had an interest in the area, would at least have the background to do more in the area, at least as far as a knowledge of the vocabulary and scientific methodology and things like that.
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And certainly, from a presuppositional perspective, what did I say on Tuesday?
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I said I hope that in the debate on Tuesday night that the presuppositional character of the examination of the data would come out.
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And in some ways it did. My biggest concern was just along those lines that that was not the main focus.
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Ken Ham did bring it up a number of times. But as far as I could tell, Bill Nye, as so many in his position, very intelligent men.
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But the problem we have today is there's so much specialization in education that the vast majority of people that I encounter, especially in the scientific community, are woefully ignorant of other areas of human knowledge, and seem to think that as long as you know something about science, that that makes you an expert in everything.
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And the greatest example of that is one of the most arrogant men on the face of the planet. And that, of course, is
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Richard Dawkins, whose knowledge of philosophy, epistemology, and other things is abjectly bad, but he's really not overly concerned about that particular issue.
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Anyways, so the presuppositional nature of that whole subject of origins and all that type of stuff certainly would be attractive to me.
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But look, there are plenty of good people working in that area already, and that's one of the reasons that I only make comments on it as they're relevant, as were in passing.
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I did not watch the debate. I mentioned to somebody on Twitter yesterday in one of those really long twee -short things that I've been doing recently, almost articles.
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Those show up someplace on the website? Yeah, on the blog or something like that?
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None of my—I thought most recent tweets did. Okay. All right.
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All right, they do, because I've been writing some—actually, they're almost blog articles.
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I've just been writing them on Twitter. I mentioned to someone briefly that one of the things that concerned me, obviously, was the—well, let me just back up here.
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I mentioned to somebody on there that I did not watch it, and it's really interesting. Y 'all know the
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Nixon -Kennedy effect? You know what I'm talking about there? I've experienced this numerous times now.
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Numerous times. What was the last one? I had a real recent example where I had listened to a debate, and then
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I talked to somebody who had watched the debate, and they had almost the exact opposite conclusions I had. I would like to suggest that if you want to analyze the arguments of two sides, listen to it, don't watch it.
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Because the watching of it, the visual, you become distracted by dress, by facial expressions, rather than actually analyzing the words and the content of the words.
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And so I did not watch the debate Tuesday night. It was interesting to watch Twitter.
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And I did, I guess, have some expectations as I began listening yesterday around, oh,
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I don't know, around 10 o 'clock, 10 .30, to the debate while I was doing a ride in South Mountain Park, which is interesting.
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I don't know why South Mountain seems to be where I listen to a lot of debates, but I remember listening to the
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Maury -Ali debate there and all sorts of stuff like that. But anyhow, so I started listening to this, and I did listen to it a little at high speed.
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That's how I listen to everything. I suppose that might have some impact upon things. I really don't know.
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It would be interesting to do a study sometime on how you subjectively feel about something, whether you listen to it at high speed or what.
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I've always thought that the faster someone's talking, the smarter they sound, so it just makes everybody sound all that much smarter, like they can think on their feet really fast and everything else.
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The format, and I'm giving you my honest analysis here. People say, you can't be honest because you're a
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Christian and you're a creationist, but you've got to create the world. You can't be honest. I'm going to try to give my honest. The format of the debate, no one asked me.
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I wish someone had. I do have a little experience in this area.
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The format stunk. Now, not that I have anything against a 30 -minute opening statement. I mean,
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Yusuf Ismail likes 30 -minute opening statements. I like having a half an hour, I suppose, but the problem with a 30 -minute opening statement is that almost automatically, there's going to be very little, much less interaction you would have otherwise.
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There was no cross -examination in this debate. There is no debate without cross -examination.
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The audience questions were sort of like a rapid fire type thing, but you have a 30 -minute opening statement, then two five -minute rebuttals.
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You guys say, well, it's like having a 10 -minute rebuttal. No, it's not because when you break it into two five minutes, you're going to be responding to what the guy said in his last five -minute rebuttal.
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That means you only had literally five minutes of response to the 30 minutes of presentation.
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That means there's really no meaningful interaction going on at that point at all. Then the audience questions come in and they weren't bad, but it's still not cross -examination and there really wasn't any meaningful closing statement either.
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So the format was horrific. Secondly, it was designed to fail from the beginning for Ken Ham.
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Now, why do I say that? As I said in the tweet that I typed, this debate ended up,
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Bill Nye was very good at making this, he isolated Ken Ham and evidently isolated the entirety of the state of Kentucky.
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Clearly, and I'm going to play it, I've got clips skewed up, clearly believed, he clearly believes that he was basically doing foreign missions work here.
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I mean, Bill Nye, obviously, many times he talked about those of us on the outside.
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I mean, you could not help but get the idea that he was thinking that basically, he's going into a third world country here where most people don't have a full complement of teeth and the collective
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IQ of the entire state of Kentucky will be on average below 75. And there was really a sense of arrogance there.
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I mean, he's a nice guy and all, he's obviously good at talking to audiences, but over and over again, the idea was expressed that, well, those of us on the outside, you in here.
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And what he succeeded in doing was isolating Ken Ham and his specific narrow view of creationism and specifically his young earth creationism and one version of young earth creationism.
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And hence, the entire area that, in my opinion, is the most fruitful in this area.
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And that is intelligent design, the evidence of intelligent design, the numerous fingerprints of God that are all over creation that the evolutionist has no meaningful answer for, almost never came up.
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The most important stuff almost never came up. Sure, Ken Ham brought up presuppositions and he brought up a lot of important stuff, but because Nye was successful at framing it in the way that he did, and because there's no follow -up debate.
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You see, if they had had this debate first, and then next month they're going to do the follow -up debate at an evolution museum someplace where it's
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Nye's particular theory, because he's got his theory. He has one particular theory, and you can demonstrate that you'd be able to quote evolutionists who say his theory is all wrong, and you can point out all the different viewpoints within the evolutionary camp and stuff like that that contradict each other and how they fight with each other.
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And you could just, with no analysis whatsoever of Ham's position, then at least it would be even, and you'd put the two together.
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But that's not what's going to happen. So you only had one side being examined, not the other side being examined, and the most compelling powerful information just wasn't there, just wasn't presented.
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Ken Ham did a great job for what he was doing, but it was just the way it was set up.
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I'm just like, who thought of this? This is not, again, it would have been nice if somebody had maybe asked.
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I would have said, you know, this is really not, no, you're not going to, this is what's going to happen. You could see that coming from a long way down the road.
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Now, it's interesting that when I posted that, all of a sudden
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I once again am reminded that amongst non -evolutionists, at least non -Darwinian, amongst
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Christians who have not simply capitulated to Darwinian theory, there are some, we ain't all on the same page, obviously, and I will admit,
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I don't know all the politics of the Ken Ham group or this group or that group, and immediately I started seeing on Twitter, oh, this group has said this against Ken Ham, and this group has said this, and I'm like, okay, well, what?
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But very clearly there's a bunch of politics that yours truly doesn't know anything about. I'm not a part of that element of it.
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And then I, and I'll admit, I don't understand this. There are people on Twitter going, I just don't buy that intelligent design stuff.
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I'm like, what? I just go with the Bible. I'm like, I don't get that part.
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I've never understood the people who go, I don't know, I don't think it comes from the
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Bible. Well, what do you mean? It is THE predictive element of divine creation that the very essence of life will give evidence of a designer.
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It is, it, it would have been THE killer argument from Ken Ham to demonstrate, you want prediction, buddy?
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Let me show you where you as an evolutionist have been faced with the evidence of God's existence over and over again, all of your textbooks talk about design and express amazement at the complexity of the, of the, of cellular respiration and mitochondria and all the rest of this amazing stuff that you cannot account for the rise of these things on a basis, on the basis of, of Darwinian micromutational evolutionary theory.
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And it's all predicted on the basis of the creation theory and it never came up.
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And then you got other people going, well, I don't use that because that's, that's not from the Bible. And I'm like, what? I lost at that point, completely, completely lost.
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So, um, it was, you know, on, on the simple level of, um, consistently trying to drive his point home.
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I think Ken Ham did a great job and he did raise the presuppositional issues and Bill Nye clearly, um, is non -reflective when it comes to epistemology and worldview issues.
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Just, hey, we've got it. We, you know, just trust us. He can, he doesn't like that in Ken Ham, he just doesn't realize he's doing the same thing.
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No question about it. But on debate style, as far as ability to throw out the points, uh,
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Bill Nye won on that level really easily because of the way that the debate was set up.
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And so on the whole, I'd have to give it to Nye, uh, because of presuppositional problems with the mechanism of the debate itself.
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If there was a second debate that would allow for the balance to take place where now Ken Ham can go after him without having to be constantly in the defensive mode.
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Great. But if that's happening, no one's told me about it. So if you just take one debate and just like, look at it from that perspective, um, that was the problem.
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That was the problem with the, with the whole thing. So let's listen. Uh, I almost still had this at 2 .4
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because that's how I was trying to get out. Um, uh, somebody, somebody on, on, on Twitter, um, did you check out
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William and Craig's podcast, which refused to debate Christians? Uh, yeah, that was last week. That was, that was
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Tuesday. I played that on the program on Tuesday. Um, Mutato in channel just said,
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Bill Nye is non -reflective unlike my head. Uh, it's, it's very helpful, uh, to have that kind of, of commentary and in channel while, while, um, my head is very reflective too.
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Uh, that's just the way, the way it is. All right. Uh, what was I going to say? I'm going to play some clips here real quick and, um, but I'm not going to play them at high speed.
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I will play them at 1 .2. How's that? At least 1 .2. You want to hear what I was listening to? Let's listen to what
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I was listening to at 2 .4. Uh, here's Bill Nye at high, high speed. And here's my concern.
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What keeps the United States ahead? What makes the United States a world leader is our technology, our new ideas, our innovations. If we continue to eschew science, eschew the process and try to divide science into observational science and historic science.
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Thank you very much, uh, Bill. Uh, like I said, I understand that fine. That, that works for me just fine. But I, this was his constant repetitive theme.
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And I, I, it was at the beginning. This is an opening statement and it's at the end. And I was just left sitting there going, wow, if that's, if that's your transcendent motivation for life, well, that's really, that's, that's really pathetic.
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It really is here. Here, here we go. And here's my concern. What keeps the United States ahead?
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What makes the United States a world leader is our technology, our new ideas, our innovations.
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If we continue to eschew science, eschew the process and try to divide science into observational science and historic science, we are not going to move forward.
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We will not embrace natural laws. We will not make discoveries. We will not, uh, invent and innovate and stay ahead.
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So if you ask me if Ken Ham's, uh, creation model is viable, I say, no, it is absolutely not viable.
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So, uh, stay with us over the next period and you can compare my evidence to his. Thank you all very much.
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Now, there was a couple of times when Ken Ham tried to challenge this, but I would have given the repetitive nature of it.
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I really would have tried to put it to bed more, uh, strictly than Ken Ham did. He never bothered to substantiate what he's saying here.
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Um, we are, we are not rejecting natural law. We are saying, as Ken Ham did say, he can't even tell us where natural law comes from or whether it's going to be the same tomorrow as it is today.
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I mean, he has an epistemological problem. He just assumes these things. He is stealing from the Christian worldview. Ken Ham said all of that.
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That's exactly right. But what you need to emphasize is, Bill, why are you saying that we cannot do predictive science?
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Why are you saying that we, we've, I've shown you, he, he did show examples, but showing examples and showing the consistency of those examples to different things.
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Um, but the point is, and let me, let me zoom down to the bottom here. Here's Nye's closing statement.
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Um, again, here's, here's the big, this is why I do things. He talks about joy and everything else, but does he explain why given his worldview, he, this soon to be defunct piece of dust, whose memories will disappear and who will be forgotten why he has joy in this, where does this sense of joy come from?
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Where is the transcendent meaning, et cetera, et cetera. It sort of got lost. As my old professor,
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Carl Sagan said so often, when you're in love, you want to tell the world. And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science.
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It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I had never seen before. It fills me to joy to know that we can pursue these answers.
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It is a wonderful and astonishing thing to me that we are, you and I are somehow at least one of the ways that the universe knows itself.
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You and I are a product of the universe. It's astonishing. I admit, I see your faces that we have come to be because of the universe's existence.
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And we are driven to pursue that, to find out where we came from. And the second question we all want to know, are we alone?
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Are we alone in the universe? And these questions are deep within us and they drive us. So the process of science, the way we know nature is the most compelling thing to me.
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Did you catch the religious nature of that? The universe became personified there in case you missed that.
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I mean, this is a religious presupposition that he thinks is purely natural and doesn't even realize it.
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I just want to close by reminding everybody what's at stake here. If we abandon all that we've learned, our ancestors, what they've learned about nature and our place in it, if we abandon the process by which we know it, if we eschew, if we let go of everything that people have learned before us, if we stop driving forward, stop looking for the next answer to the next question, we in the
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United States will be out -competed by other countries, other economies. Now that would be okay, I guess, but I was born here.
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I'm a patriot. And so we have to embrace science education. To the voters and taxpayers that are watching, please keep that in mind.
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We have to keep science education in science, in science classes. There you go.
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Somehow we're against science and we've got to keep science education and we're going to fall behind other people if this guy is right.
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And of course, he had pointed out that the MRI was invented by someone who believes like he believes and stuff like that.
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So he never provided us a foundation for why he has this joy or why he has this drive.
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He was just describing things. He can't give reasons for things. That's one of the problems with people who are scientists, who are narrowly trained that don't get the idea that, you know, there's other stuff you've got to explain out there.
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That's not giving a reason. That's not giving a reason. That was an amazing element of his repeated assertions, which
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I found to be very, very odd. There's somebody on Twitter here and I don't get it. Chris J.
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Simone's 2 says, in other words, Nye was being condescending, but faked politeness. Come on, be honest,
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Jim. Being dishonest? I don't get that one.
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I don't know. Anyways, and then my daughter is eating Brussels sprouts and watching the dividing line during dinner.
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It's almost like I'm joining in with the family. It's not quite the same because we really can't have much of a back and forth.
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But hi, guys. Brussels sprouts. I didn't raise you to eat. Anyways, I'm sorry.
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Yeah. OK, we continue on. I just want to review briefly with everybody why we accept in the outside world, why we accept the
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Big Bang. Now, I got really tired. It became repetitive, insulting and condescending.
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We in the outside world, those of us who are who are here to help you, we know that that you have problems.
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In fact, I'm going to use a Star Trek analogy here. And so is
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Sean watching? Is Sean in channel? Because at least there will be one person in channel who will understand this.
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And I think there might be some others. Yep. Sean's there. OK, Sean Cornell's going to hear this. The idea that that crossed my mind was
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Bill Nye was Geordi who beamed onto the
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Pakled ship. And and yep, there you go. And we make things go.
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Yeah. Yeah. And so Geordi is there and he's trying to help them. But they're pretty simple, you know, because they're in Kentucky.
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So evidently from the Star Trek universe, Bill Nye thinks he's from the
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Federation and the folks at the Creation Museum in Kentucky are Paklets. That's that's.
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Oh, my. Is that not the attitude? You know, we are we are we on the big ship.
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Can we show you how we do? Oh, it just after a while was like, really?
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Seriously? And then we have
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Mutata, also known as the brain behind the brain behind Milo Hotzenbuehler says evolutionists are like tribbles.
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They multiply for no good reason. Oh, that was good.
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And someone quoted there it is. Good old
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David Silverman. Remember David Silverman? David Silverman's now the president of American Atheists. And I embarrassed
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David Silverman rather badly when I debated him in New York.
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Good. We need to. But during the debate, he tweeted, I want to punch can ham.
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I won't, I promise. But I want to. So there is there is the president of the
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American Atheists demonstrating why the American Atheists are the American Atheists.
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Anyway, we we press on with the further comments here. Now, my
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Kentucky friends. Yeah, I want you to consider this. My Paklet friends. Just just translate it in your mind.
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My Paklet friends. Right now, there is no place in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to get a degree in this kind of nuclear medicine, this kind of drugs associated with that.
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So that clearly proves that California is better than Kentucky because there are more smart people.
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So leave the Paklets and come to the Federation. We will train you.
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We will teach you. Now, one last thing. You may not know that in the U .S. Constitution from the founding fathers is the sentence to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
34:02
Kentucky voters, voters who might be watching online in places like Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, more places, please, you don't want to raise a generation of science students who don't understand how we know our place in the cosmos, our place in space, who don't understand natural law and catch that natural law is how you know your place in the cosmos.
34:23
This man is as religious and presuppositional as Ken Ham is.
34:29
He just doesn't know it. He just doesn't know it. He won't face it. That's an amazing, amazing.
34:37
And when you think you're talking to Paklets, it's understandable why you won't listen to them telling you that. I'm sorry,
34:42
I can't help it. I'm hearing that going. You know, Kentucky voters, we don't want to raise a generation of scientists without all their teeth in their mouth.
34:50
That's exactly what he's saying. It's absolutely amazing. Now, I could not find it, and I am very, very angry with myself about this.
35:00
I listened, I heard it, and I could not find it. Maybe I, I don't know what
35:06
I did to it, but I could not find where Bill Nye talked about the rational man.
35:12
I mean, he called himself the rational man a couple of times, but there was one point where he talked about the rational man. And Al Mohler, in his review yesterday morning of the debate, because I guess he was sitting in the very front row, likewise zeroed in on this, his discussion of the rational man, the autonomous man, the human without need of reference to God.
35:34
This came up a lot, and clearly this is, I mean, if you want to see a picture of the non -reflective secular mind, this is what you got.
35:46
Brilliant man in certain areas. The problem is, they think their brilliance in those areas mean that they're brilliant in all areas, and they have some huge blind spots.
35:56
But as long as they think that the rest of us are packlids, they're not going to really think about what we have to say about that.
36:03
Mr. Ham's point of view, that the Bible is American English, serves as a science text, and that he and his followers will interpret that for you,
36:14
I want you to consider what that means. It means that Mr. Ham's word or his interpretation of these other words is somehow to be more respected than what you can observe in nature, what you can find literally in your backyard in Kentucky.
36:29
It's a troubling and unsettling point of view, and it's one I'd very much like you to address when you come back.
36:36
I'm not 100 % certain what Bill Nye thinks a worldview is.
36:44
Evidently you can get a PhD in science and not know anything about worldviews, not know anything about the overriding roles of presuppositions and epistemology and things like that.
36:55
As long as you can do chromatography right, you're on. Get that periodic table down, buddy, and you're good.
37:06
What he just said there, obviously his knowledge of the Bible is pathetic.
37:14
He kept talking about a 3 ,500 -year -old book translated into modern
37:19
English, and he even used the telephone game analogy, which means he has no clue as to where the
37:27
Bible came from, the fact that there are some of us, believe it or not, in this world that actually read the original languages.
37:35
We still teach that stuff, it's amazing. He may not think that they can teach
37:40
Greek and Hebrew in Kentucky. The Paklids, pretty limited in their literary output,
37:47
I would imagine. So he just may think all he can do is read it in English, he can't read a regional language, there's nobody associated with the
37:56
Creation Museum who can read Hebrew or Greek or anything like that, I don't know. And he doesn't know anything about the transmission, the use of manuscripts, all that stuff, very obviously, well beyond his education at that point.
38:11
And to be honest with you, the fact of the matter is that the reason he'd bring these things up and say the things the way he did is he doesn't think that's really what matters anyways.
38:22
That is a level of education that's not nearly as important as his own. That comes across very clearly in what he's saying.
38:31
And that can be very offensive to us, I mean we've sort of chuckled about the Paklid thing, but look, did any of you click on the debate hashtag, the creation debate hashtag, after the debate was over?
38:45
Yeah, Rich says he didn't want to. I did, someone in channel mentioned that they did.
38:53
Wow, it was wow. This fellow on Twitter says, thanks, didn't know what a
39:02
Paklid was. Are the Paklids on YouTube? I'll bet you there's got to be some clips from the
39:09
Paklids. We find things, we make things go. Look it up and you'll go, yeah, that's exactly, yeah, there you go.
39:22
So anyhow, what was
39:27
I saying? I don't know, I've got too many things going on here in front of me. Let me see,
39:33
I've got a few others to get to here and we're running through time here. There's a question that troubles us all from the time we are absolutely youngest and first able to think, and that is where did we come from?
39:44
Where did I come from? And this question is so compelling that we've invented the science of astronomy, we've invented life science, we've invented physics, we've discovered these natural laws so that we can learn more about our origin and where we came from.
40:00
Okay, you're exactly right, we are driven to that, but your worldview doesn't explain why we are.
40:07
Do you hear him? He's just observing a fact and he's attacking
40:12
Ken Ham as saying, you folks are not going to ask why. But he hasn't asked why, he has these desires to know these things.
40:23
He is over and over again stealing from our worldview wholesale.
40:29
And Ken Ham told him this. I'm not saying he didn't, he did.
40:35
He's stealing from our worldview and doesn't even seem to realize he's doing it.
40:41
And his followers certainly didn't recognize that either, but that's what he's doing.
40:47
To you, when it says he invented the stars also, that's satisfying. You're done.
40:53
Oh good, okay. To me, when I look at the night sky, I want to know what's out there. I'm driven. I want to know if what's out there is any part of me, and indeed it is.
41:03
The, oh by the way, I find compelling, you are satisfied. And the big thing I want from you, Mr. Ham.
41:08
Now, I got to stop that right there because this needed to be more thoroughly knocked out of the park.
41:19
When Ken said, I'm satisfied that God created the stars, that doesn't mean that he was saying,
41:25
I'm satisfied that I don't need to know anything more about what God created. That I can just go on and sing kumbaya and I don't have to worry about it.
41:33
That's not what he was saying. That's a misrepresentation on Nye's part. No one, the drive to know
41:42
God's universe is stronger in someone who wishes to glorify the
41:47
God of the universe than the person who in pagan worship is trying to glorify the universe itself.
41:54
Because the universe is a cruel, dark, cold place.
42:02
There are relatively few little spots of warmth and light in the midst of a lot of darkness and destruction.
42:15
And if you try to personalize the universe to become the object of your worship, it's not going to provide you with any real, meaningful, transcendent meaning at all.
42:30
It's just not. Now, of course, I am not at all shocked that Sean found the
42:37
Paklids. Let me see if I can bring the Paklids up here. Do you want me to pull this up?
42:48
Okay. Let's see if we can do this. This will be fun. I've got to do this and go to window and go to Safari.
43:03
Do you have it? You do have it. But I don't have audio.
43:10
No, I don't. There's wires here.
43:21
Oh, it's going to reach. What was that? It sounded like a radio station.
43:27
Okay, here we go. All right. I'm First Officer William Riker of the
43:34
USS Enterprise. We're responding to your distress signal. Uh -huh. What is your problem?
43:40
He's from Kentucky. We are far from home. In Kentucky? Aren't we all?
43:47
But you said out of Mayday? Aren't we all? Do you need help? We are
43:53
Paklids. Our ship is the Mondor. It is broken.
44:02
We are far from home. We need help. Let me guess, their rubber band broke, right?
44:10
Sensors indicate engineering problems. They are experiencing total guidance system failure with less than 24 hours reserve power.
44:17
Maybe I can help. What brings you so far from home? We look for things.
44:23
Things to make us go. Things we need. Can you be more specific?
44:31
Things that make us go. Okay. There's the Paklids, folks.
44:37
Was I not right? Is that not exactly? We are far from home.
44:47
I would like to point out that Alpha Omega Ministries just played that clip for the purpose of parody. Therefore, we meet the requirements of the, what is that?
44:56
I don't know what it is. Fair use. Yes. Fair use. Parody.
45:02
Yes. We laughed. We were illustrating what
45:08
Bill Nye thinks Kentuckians at the Creation Museum are actually all about is that they are
45:13
Paklids. There you go. Thank you,
45:22
Sean. One of our new resident geeks and channel gave us the
45:29
URL for that. We now have Wirecast. We make things go. Oh, yeah.
45:36
Okay. I better get back to review here real quick before we get into a lot of trouble. You know what?
45:44
We aren't quite as advanced as we thought we were. If a scientist, if anybody makes a discovery that changes the way people view natural law, scientists embrace him or her.
46:00
No, you don't. This was the one point in the debate where I just felt, thankfully,
46:09
I was not descending. I was ascending. So I was going slowly enough that even if I started yelling a lot,
46:14
I would just sort of do this number and fall over slowly. But when you're coming down the mountain, you're doing that at 25 to 35 miles per hour.
46:21
And then it can be fatal. I'm sorry, Bill. I know you think that what you're saying is true, but it's not, and I can prove it.
46:35
Somebody asked, he did later on, he did try to interact, I'm not sure I'm going to get to it.
46:40
He did try to interact with intelligent design and just demonstrated very, very quickly that he wasn't doing it in any meaningful fashion.
46:51
Just look at FTP synthase in the walls of the mitochondria.
46:58
Look at that mechanism. Look at how it takes mechanical energy and turns the pressure gradient into mechanical energy, then use the mechanical energy to reattach a phosphate molecule to create
47:16
FTP. It is, you know, diphosphate to triphosphate.
47:23
I've talked about this before. It's an awesome, awesome, I guess I could bring it up. It's on YouTube. But it's an incredible mechanism.
47:31
And I'm sorry, but you cannot sit there and go, oh, yeah, that arose naturally.
47:38
Yeah, you know, this statement that he makes here is betrayed by every naturalist who does handstands to try to get around the obviously created and designed nature of the world around us.
48:00
If a scientist, if anybody makes a discovery that changes the way people view natural law, scientists embrace him or her.
48:11
No, scientists kick them out. Kick them out. ATP synthase, adenosine triphosphate, when it's broken down in the muscles becomes adenosine diphosphate.
48:20
It's breaking off that phosphate molecule that creates the energy. And so this mechanism reattaches a phosphate using the pressure gradient.
48:28
That's how you come up with ATP. So scientists look at that and go for your, do what
48:35
I did when I co -authored What's With the Mutant and the Microscope with Kevin Johnson years ago.
48:42
We talked about this. Go to the textbooks where they describe these things.
48:50
These folks will do handstands to try to avoid using language of design and purpose, but they can't do it.
49:02
They can't do it. They see it, but they suppress it, but they suppress it.
49:07
They don't embrace it. Look what has happened to so many people who've actually come out as scientists working in those institutions and said, this is what
49:18
I believe. And they're gone. They're gone. This is one place where Bill Nye is either being extremely naive, which is possible, or somewhat deceptive.
49:33
This person's fantastic. Louis Pasteur. You made reference to germs. No, if you find something that changes, that disagrees with the common thought, that's the greatest thing going in science.
49:43
We look forward to that change. We challenge you. Tell us why the universe is accelerating. Tell us why these mothers were getting sick.
49:51
And we found an explanation for it. And just the idea that the majority has sway in science is true only up to a point.
49:59
And it's a very, very, very important point today, as expelled pointed out very, very strongly.
50:08
You can measure how fast the continents were spreading. That's how we do it on the outside. There was another one of those examples of the, that's how we do it on the outside, outside of the walls of Kentucky.
50:22
We in the Federation can enlighten you. I encourage you to take the next minute and address this problem.
50:27
I love this. Check this out. This was a real rhetorical element on Nye's part.
50:35
He's had the two minute part. And I catch these things for an obvious reason. Been there, done that, got the t -shirt many, many, many times, especially once you get into this part where you've got two minutes, one minute audience question.
50:48
It's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If you really want to know what this is like, sometime, you know, get a stopwatch and have somebody ask you questions where you only have a certain period of time to answer.
51:00
And then check this out. Check out what Bill Nye wants Ken Ham to do in 60 seconds.
51:07
Ready? Go. I encourage you to take the next minute and address this problem of the fossils, this problem of the ice layers, this problem of the ancient trees, this problem of the arc.
51:19
I see no incompatibility between religions and science. So you've got one minute and here's five subjects.
51:28
That's 12 seconds per. And give us an in -depth answer. And you're like, oh, really? Seriously?
51:33
Come on. Let's try to be at least somewhat serious here.
51:39
Time there, Mr. Nye, response. So it sounds to me, just listening to you over the last two minutes, that there's certain parts of this document of the
51:47
Bible that you embrace literally. Now, the audience question had been, do you take the
51:52
Bible completely literally? Now, as soon as anybody says that, I realize you're not talking about someone who knows anything about the
51:59
Bible. Because they don't know the Bible is a collection of books. They don't know that the Bible contains all sorts of different types of genre of literature.
52:08
You've got poetry and apocalyptic and didactic and prophetic and historical. And you've got all these different kinds of literature and they're in different languages and at different times and development of cultures and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
52:23
And so to go, well, you just take it literally is either not meant to be taken seriously or is an indication that it would take a lot longer than two minutes to educate the person asking the question about the book that they are actually giving an objection to.
52:41
But Nye doesn't get that either. I mean, here's another example where someone can be greatly educated in science with almost no education in literature.
52:53
We have time there. Mr. Nye, response. So it sounds to me, just listening to you over the last two minutes, that there's certain parts of this document of the
53:01
Bible that you embrace literally and other parts you consider poetry. So it sounds to me in those last two minutes like you're going to take what you like.
53:09
No, you actually interpret the poetry as poetry. That might be its literal meaning is poetic.
53:18
I mean, really, seriously? Interpret literally and other passages you're going to interpret as poetic or descriptions of human events.
53:28
All that aside, I'll just say scientifically or as a reasonable man, it doesn't seem possible that all these things that contradict your literal interpretation of those first...
53:39
What? You didn't catch that? Yeah, I think you need to... This is again, this is
53:46
Riker. And no, this is Geordi. Did they ever ban break? This is where their ban break comment comes in.
53:53
Or as a reasonable man, it doesn't seem possible. I'll just say scientifically or as a reasonable man, it doesn't seem possible that all these things that contradict your literal interpretation of those first few passages, all those things that contradict that,
54:10
I find unsettling when you want me to embrace the rest of it as literal. Now, as I say,
54:16
I'm not a theologian, but we started this debate. Is the Ken Ham's creation model viable? Does it hold water?
54:21
Can it fly? Does it describe anything? And I'm still looking for an answer. Okay, there you go.
54:27
All right, one last thing here. I've already played it. I actually am going to sneak it in here. Here is where he tries to deal with intelligent design.
54:35
And I just don't... Well, here. When it comes to intelligent design, which is, if I understand your interpretation of the question, intelligent design has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of nature.
54:52
This is to say, the old expression is if you were to find a watch in the field and you pick it up, you would realize that it was created by somebody who was thinking ahead, somebody with an organization chart, with somebody at the top.
55:03
And you'd order screws from screw manufacturers and springs from spring manufacturers and glass crystals from crystal manufacturers. Yeah, but the real thing here,
55:13
Dr. Nye, is that the watch has a purpose and the purpose is to measure time.
55:22
And so the one who made it had to have the concept of time and hence the ability to design a complex mechanism whereby time could be measured by a mechanical device.
55:37
That's design. But that's not how nature works. This is the fundamental insight in the explanation for living things that's provided by evolution.
55:47
Ah, so your overriding authority is the theory of evolution, not the obvious result of finding a watch, which demonstrates that there is, in fact, a watch maker.
56:04
Evolution is a process that adds complexity through natural selection. This is to say, nature has its mediocre designs eaten by its good designs.
56:13
Now, I would argue that 99 .99 % of all genetic variation called mutation is destructive.
56:22
And so you've only got a very small percentage of allegedly positive mutation, and that somehow becomes the driving engine for the creation of complexity.
56:36
This is, I really think, the Achilles heel, and this is where the focus should have been.
56:42
But again, that wasn't really the topic of the debate, I guess. And that's why he gets away with this kind of thing.
56:48
And so the perception that there's a designer that created all this is not necessarily true, because we have an explanation that is far more compelling and provides predictions and things are repeatable.
57:00
I'm sure Mr. Ham here... I'm sorry, I missed it. So, adding complexity is how you design complex systems, but you'd have to do that in big jumps, not in just small little steps, which he doesn't believe in unless he's not a micromutational theorist.
57:26
And that didn't really get asked, did it? Oh, well. Anyhow, hopefully some of those thoughts will get you thinking.
57:34
I don't know. Unfortunately for a lot of folks, about the only thing they'll take away from this is that Bill Nye thinks that Kentucky is infested with packlets.
57:44
And that's not really what I was trying to say, but it does very clearly indicate the attitude that the elite have toward those of us who do not buy into their unproven worldview assumptions and presuppositions.
58:04
I was going to get to some other stuff. I had stuff on middle knowledge and Mullenism and stuff, but we will have one more program before we go dark, or before maybe we just have to invite someone to come in.
58:16
I'll bet you John Sampson would come in. Yeah, don't you think he's local? I bet you John will come in and do a program or two for us, maybe, or something like that.
58:24
We'll have to see. We don't want to just leave everybody. And once I get over there, and my friends in Ukraine have called in on Skype, that means they had a decent enough connection to do it.
58:35
So maybe we'll be able to do that. So we'll see what we can work out.
58:42
But we will be back, Lord willing, on Tuesday. And we'll have more about what's coming up on the trip and stuff like that.